In the mid-1990s, residents of Anniston, Alabama, began a legal fight against the agrochemical company Monsanto over the dumping of PCBs in the city s historically African American and white working-class west side. Simultaneously, Anniston environmentalists sought to safely eliminate chemical weaponry that had been secretly stockpiled near the city during the Cold War. In this probing work, Ellen Griffith Spears offers a compelling narrative of Anniston s battles for environmental justice, exposing how systemic racial and class inequalities reinforced during the Jim Crow era played out in these intense contemporary social movements.

Spears focuses attention on key figures who shaped Anniston from Monsanto s founders to white and African American activists to the ordinary Anniston residents whose lives and health were deeply affected by the town s military-industrial history and the legacy of racism. Situating the personal struggles and triumphs of Anniston residents within a larger national story of regulatory regimes and legal strategies that have affected toxic towns across America, Spears unflinchingly explores the causes and implications of environmental inequalities, showing how civil rights movement activism undergirded Anniston s campaigns for redemption and justice.

From award-winning children s author Jean Fritz comes the incredible true account of the Long March, a six-thousand-mile journey across China

In 1986, Jean Fritz went to China and talked to survivors of the Long March. It is from their recollections and her own broad, personal knowledge of Chinese history that Fritz has written one of the most compelling accounts of the incredible six-thousand-mile journey across China made by the Communist Army in 1934 and 1935.

Fritz takes us on the route of the sixty-mile-long First Front Army, the unit of Mao Zedong that wound its way through a terrain so perilous it was often more threatening than their battles with the enemy. The fear of a young soldier on Old Mountain afraid to go to sleep in case he might roll over and fall off the cliff is real to us; the drama and devastation that reduced the Red Army to twenty thousand men and women are immediate. And when the army crosses the thundering Dadu River on the threadbare remains of a bridge, we cross our fingers and hope to make it, too.

Skillfully placing events within the context of history, Fritz allows us to view them with the perspective of time, and, as she shares the memories of those she talked with, she brings humanness and intimacy to the participants and their unforgettable journey.

Barb Barrett, recently divorced, is determined to reinvent herself. She moves into a house once occupied by Vladimir Nabokov and discovers what could be his last unpublished manuscript. From there she begins a painful yet joyous journey.